When creating your public repository from a fork of someone's project, make sure to include a license file that determines how you want your project to be shared with others.

For more information on open source, specifically how to create and grow an open source project, we've created Open Source Guides that will help you foster a healthy open source community by recommending best practices for creating and maintaining repositories for your open source project.
You can also take a free GitHub Learning Lab course on maintaining open source communities.

You might fork a project in order to propose changes to the upstream, or original, repository. In this case, it's good practice to regularly sync your fork with the upstream repository. To do this, you'll need to use Git on the command line. You can practice setting the upstream repository using the same octocat/Spoon-Knife repository you just forked!

The sky's the limit with the changes you can make to a fork, including:

Creating branches:Branches allow you to build new features or test out ideas without putting your main project at risk.

Opening pull requests: If you are hoping to contribute back to the original repository, you can send a request to the original author to pull your fork into their repository by submitting a pull request.